[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 34 (Wednesday, March 23, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
           FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 1993

  The SPEAKER. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from 
Texas, [Mr. Gonzalez], is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GONZALEZ. Mr. Speaker, In the old days, doctors used to ``bleed'' 
patients in order to bring them back to health. Unfortunately, more 
than a few patients have failed to respond to this therapy. This is a 
disturbing analogy with the Federal Reserve's current prescription for 
economic health--a policy of raising interest rates in order to slow 
down an already dragging economic recovery. Rather than resuscitating 
the patient, the doctors at the Fed are knocking the patient 
unconscious.
  I have previously spoken about the Federal Reserve's faulty measures 
of inflation and its obsession with achieving zero inflation, something 
that could backfire and cause massive unemployment. Today I want to 
focus on the weakness of the U.S. recovery. There is a serious 
inconsistency between the conditions nearly everyone in the labor 
market encounters and the aggregate statistics compiled by the 
Government which show overall economic activity picking up from 1991 
when growth was negative. In many parts of the country, as many of my 
colleagues have found in their districts, people are talking about how 
hard it is to find a good job. Many of the jobs that are available do 
not pay well.
  Well, my colleagues, I will show you that what you hear from your 
constituents in your home districts supports the evidence that the U.S. 
economy is far from a complete recovery.
  I have a graph depicting the ratio of help wanted advertising to 
unemployment. What this graph shows is that the number of help wanted 
ad in the country's newspapers per officially unemployed person, fell 
dramatically in 1989, 1 year before the official recession. It did not 
hit bottom until 1992, over 1\1/2\ years after the official end of the 
recession of 1990-91.
  The quality of jobs has also deteriorated. The Economist reported in 
its March 19, 1994 edition [p.27.]:

       College graduates typically enter the labor force around 
     $10,000 in debt, from loans taken out to pay soaring tuition 
     bills. The job market they enter is one in which 22 percent 
     of employed Americans are either part-time or temporary 
     workers, the highest proportion ever; indeed, employment with 
     temp agencies accounted for 15 percent of the new jobs 
     created last year and 26 percent the year before.

  As trained and experienced people are laid off all over the country 
they not only find fewer ads seeking employees, but the quality of the 
jobs being offered has seriously fallen.
  This kind of evidence comes on top of another serious economic 
problem. Hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, for 80 percent of the 
U.S. work force--the nonsupervisory workers--have been falling since 
1973. Today workers' earnings after adjustment for inflation are where 
they were in 1965. This variable is called ``real hourly earnings.'' 
Along with the decline in real hourly earnings has come a decline in 
real weekly earnings.
  What this means is that most of the Nation's workers buy less and 
less with the money they earn. Today they can only buy about the same 
as they could in 1965.
  So, as they drink toasts to the great recovery of 1994 over at the 
money temple and make plans to stifle it before it gets going too 
strongly, I ask them to visit Main Street, USA and find out what is 
really going on. On Main Street they will hear from the Nation's 
workers that this is not a vigorous recovery. This is not time to 
stifle what little recovery we have.
  My colleagues, in this time of national economic stress and a Federal 
Reserve policy of raising interest rates, it is vital that we have a 
full record of the positions taken by each individual Federal Reserve 
official. We need complete and timely release of the records of Federal 
Reserve meetings where these officials determine much of our economic 
future. I ask you to support my bill, H.R. 28, the Federal Reserve 
System Accountability Act of 1993. We cannot let the Federal Reserve 
operate in a cult of secrecy where its official do not have to disclose 
to the public their individual decisions at their meetings, which have 
a profound impact on all of our lives.

                              {time}  1910

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. McNulty). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Goss] is recognized for 5 
minutes.

  [Mr. GOSS addressed the House. His remarks will appear hereafter in 
the Extensions of Remarks.]

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